1) "Dust and Shadow" by Lyndsay Faye
Once more Sherlock Holmes pursues Jack the Ripper.
Looking back nearly 50 years, Dr. John Watson recalls the events of 1888, when a brutal murder in Whitechapel gripped London and began a reign of terror. The grisly discovery of a second female victim, slain with equal violence in a disreputable district, awakens Holmes’s special interest. At first Inspector Lestrade is grateful for the insights of the master sleuth. Scarcely has Holmes begun questioning the family of the victims when more young women are found murdered. The perpetrator, whom the press dubs “Jack the Ripper,” begins to send Holmes letters full of taunting braggadocio and threats. To the consternation of Lestrade, Holmes enlists a covert operative in the person of Mary Ann Monk, who identified the second victim, her friend Polly Nichols, and is anxious to improve her station in life. At great personal risk, she remains in the city’s tenderloin, gathering information. As the number of victims grows, Holmes and Watson follow leads all over the city and the case takes an emotional toll on Lestrade. Bizarre twists follow: Holmes disappears for a while and, after he is gravely wounded during an encounter with the Ripper, the killer goes on hiatus, leading an investigative journalist named Dunlevy to speculate that Holmes himself might be the killer.
Faye’s debut novel faithfully captures period flavor, though a lighter touch would have been welcome at times. Her greater achievement is using the Ripper case to present a more complex portrait of Holmes and his world.
2) "The Beekeeper's Apprentice" by Laurie R. King
3) "The West End Horror" by Nicholas Meyer
Following the success of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) which this may be 2% short of--Mr. Meyer received many communiques as well as this ""long lost manuscript"" of Dr. Watson's, withheld rather than lost. It is roughly carbon-paper dated after WW I and before Holmes' death, and deals with the stabbing of a drama critic McCarthy with a Javanese knife, applied with ""humane immediacy,"" to be followed by the murder of his young ingenue-mistress. Real people are in and out of the wings: Oscar Wilde and Gilbert & Sullivan and Shaw and Ellen Terry and particularly Bram Stoker whose lair they case. After all Stoker had been known to use Indian cigars, one of the telltale smoked herrings. There is the same good humor (Holmes appears with far greater affability in these two chronicles than heretofore), the same discreet surveillance and olympian interpretation all preceding Holmes' unnerving discovery of a far greater horror that might overtake more than the West End. . . . A three-pipe evening, for any loge seat in the house.
County Cat Link
4) "Sherlock Holmes VS Dracula" by Loren D. Estleman
Despite the comic-book title, this is an example of the more cautious and studied sort of pseudo-Sherlock, with lots of references to the Canon and Watson in familiar ""Good Lord!"" form. Not that the purist approach makes Estleman's academic, short-story-sized notion any more prepossessing. The premise: a Russian ship arrives in England with all aboard de-blooded and dead, then disoriented children start turning up on Hampstead Heath with wounds on their throats, so an intrigued Holmes follows the clues to a vaulted chamber where Brain Stoker's Van Helsing is driving a stake through a vampirette's heart. Holmes thus learns of Dracula and seeks out his London hiding places, and the Count responds by kidnapping Mrs. Watson (""the fiend has my wife""). As usual, Holmes seems to die but is quickly resurrected, and no doubt he'll be surfacing again soon in still other jiggers of literary milk-of-magnesia for the Baker Street Irregulars.
5) "A Study in Sherlock" by Laurie R. King
King (The Art of Detection, 2006, etc.) and Klinger (The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2004, etc.) offer a selection of tributes to The Great Detective.
The 17 all-new entries range from homage to pastiche to mere whiffs of the deerstalker. In the comic-book format “The Mysterious Case of the Unwritten Short Story,” Colin Cotterill revels in being asked to contribute to such an important volume despite his complete ignorance of all things Sherlock. (His greatest concern seems to be avoiding “gaffs.”) Others are slicker. In “A Triumph of Logic,” Gayle Lynds and John Sheldon use Holmes proxy Linwood Boothby and his law clerk Artie Morey to prove that Emmy Holcrofts’s niece Ina Lederer did not really commit suicide. Lee Childs’ “The Bone-Headed League” gives the Doyle classic a modern twist, while S.J. Rozan retells Doyle’s tale from the opium-den-owners’ perspective in “The Men With the Twisted Lips.” Margaret Maron elevates Watson to the role of detective in “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist,” complete with Mrs. Hudson as his Watson, while in “The Case That Holmes Lost,” Charles Todd makes Conan Doyle the client, with lawyer John Whitman standing in for Holmes. Both Laura Lippman, in “The Last of Sheila-Locke Holmes,” and Jacqueline Winspear, in “A Spot of Detection,” trace the effect of too much Sherlock on young minds. Post-Holmes technology has its place. Dana Stabenow’s “The Eyak Interpreter” runs as a blog, and King and Klinger’s afterword offers a twitter exchange with King’s invention, Holmes’s wife Mary Russell. But the best stories focus on the universal appeal of Holmes. Tony Broadbent in “As to ‘An Exact Knowledge of London’ ” and Neil Gaiman in “The Case of Death and Honey” both explore the tantalizing question of how Holmes manages to be both fictional and immortal.
Enough variety for the dabbler, together with enough reverence for the canon to appeal to the true Holmes addict.
6) "The Italian Secretary" by Caleb Carr
Will Holmes and Watson foil a regicide plot that seems the work of German spies colluding with Scots Nationalists? Is the queen Victoria?
Carr returns to the period thriller genre (The Alienist, 1994, and The Angel of Darkness, 1997) with this sinuous caper, which begins when the Great Detective receives a coded message from his equally brilliant older brother Mycroft, a “solitary intelligencer” and government operative whose duties give him unprecedented access to the royal person. Before you can say, “Kindly serve the tea, Mrs. Hudson,” Holmes and Watson are aboard a train heading to Scotland (briefly distracted by bombs tossed into their compartment), where Mycroft discloses the facts about two mysterious deaths. An architect and a workman involved in restoration work at the Queen’s Edinburgh retreat Holyroodhouse have perished in frightful ways that suggest the possible presence of a vengeful spirit—that of eponymous royal servant “David Rizzio, private secretary, music instructor, and confidant to Mary, Queen of Scots”—who (Rizzio, that is) was murdered in 1566 by surly Protestants who declared him a papal agent. While never discounting the possibility of supernatural doings (to Watson’s intense annoyance), Holmes interrogates Holyroodie’s affable caretaker Lord Hamilton, a dangerous-looking butler, and his brood, along with the chaps at the Fife and Drum Tavern, then pieces together scattered clues to uncover a conspiracy rather different from the one Mycroft had suspected. It’s fun for about a hundred pages, because Carr apes Conan Doyle’s plummy storyteller’s voice quite ably, making Watson (who narrates) agreeably bluff and direct. But the successive disclosures become increasingly preposterous, as a veryprotracted climax incorporates flaming bodies, a (really rather tiresome) maiden in distress, “a medieval siege weapon” —and Holmes’s rather lame affirmation of all the things we cannot ever fully explain.
We needed this, from Sherlock Holmes? No thanks.
7) "The Final Solution: A Story of Detection" by Michael Chabon
In wartime England, an old sleuth comes out of retirement to solve the case of a mute boy and his parrot, and their connection to a murder.
Chabon’s move into the world of detective fiction (after The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, 2000, etc.) produces mostly admirable results. The year is 1944, the setting a remote British village. The retired detective who lives there in rather fearsome solitude—tending to his beekeeping—is brought back to work by the local constabulary after a recent visitor to the village turns up murdered. It’s suspected by some that another new arrival to the village may have something to do with the case. Nine-year-old Linus is a mute German-Jewish boy who stays at a local rooming house and is mostly known for the German-speaking parrot that’s never far from his shoulder. The sleuth soon realizes that issues of national security could be involved here, with spies and code-breaking à la The 39 Steps, and he has to bring all his analytical skill to bear. That he’s an impressive detective is a fact definitely agreed upon by the police, as it is by the author himself, who drops more than a few hints that the quiet old man, whose name seems to never come up, could be the great Sherlock Holmes himself, sans Watson. The result might be less than what Chabon fans would like to see, and also less than hard-core mystery readers would prefer. Nor does a slow start help matters any. Still, though what we have here is definitely Chabon in a minor key, he hasn’t spared any effort in its execution. The English countryside is engagingly detailed, a trip to London under the Blitz especially effective in its somber tone of wartime malaise.
A fun, short snip of a detective yarn that, even so, leaves more questions than answers.
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